Why excessive timidity risks handing the keys to the far-right

The far-right want to take power in the UK, and to do that they will need to get most of their votes from the very people who will suffer from their policies: the least wealthy 90% of the population.

To address this issue, they have developed both a disinformation eco-system of extraordinary and still-growing power and a proven rhetorical toolkit which, together, can be enough to give them the votes they need:

• We are surrounded by a media and social media ecosystem of unprecedented power – and its power is still growing;
• Their rhetorical toolkit is highly effective;
• In combination, these things can shift voters’ perceptions further and faster than ever before – and determine election results.

We must recognise that we are not dealing with the politics of 40 years ago – or even 10 years ago: we are watching a battle for control of the UK, which the extremely wealthy are determined to win. For now, if they are prepared to act, governments still have the power to tackle the threat. But ours, at least, has been very hesitant. That must change.

Their influence ecosystem has unprecedented power

We have long had a press landscape dominated by wealthy owners with far-right views. In the 1930s, for example, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail openly supported the Fascists and lauded Hitler, Lord Beaverbrook (owner of the Daily Express and Evening Standard) was also friendly with Hitler and supported appeasement. And The Times was also supportive of Hitler and refused to publish critical articles. More surprisingly, the Mirror (which was also owned by Rothermere) published some of the same pro-fascist articles.

But since Thatcher’s media reforms, we have seen further changes:

“Her government helped Rupert Murdoch achieve his current dominance of the national newspaper and commercial television markets. Her period in office was marked by the role of lobbying by media organisations. The Thatcher government nodded through Murdoch’s key deals – the takeover of Times Newspapers in 1981 and the merger of Sky with British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB) in 1990 to create BskyB – without reference to the competition authorities or the regulators. The evidence disclosed at the Leveson Inquiry shows, in some cases for the first time, how Margaret Thatcher was personally involved in these deals, setting a precedent for the increasingly intense (and usually secret) contacts between politicians and media organisations which helped determine media policy under Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron.”

And if we look at the reach of these media owners today, we see how successful a few far-right billionaires are in controlling our press landscape.

Of the UK’s major dailies, only the Guardian is not owned by either private equity or one of Lebedev, Murdoch, Rothermere or Axel Springer. A vast preponderance of far-right owners control what most people read. And the BBC increasingly follows their lead.

In recent years, of course, we also have social media to consider. After Brexit, the British journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed the roles of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in using sophisticated micro-targeting of tailored messages to voters during the Brexit campaign. She showed that, for the first time in UK politics, modern Psychological Operations (PsyOps) techniques had been deployed against the British population and highlighted the risk to democracy this implied.

Since then, the technology has advanced further, and the amount of data held on each of us has increased – but nothing has been done to prevent such PsyOps from being used in future elections. We have effectively chosen to ignore the threat because tackling it is difficult. The threat is now greater. Elon Musk – the world’s richest man – has bought Twitter, which was at the time a progressive social media outlet, and turned it into X, an amplifier of far-right ideas. His own posts have not held back and often support extremists like ‘Tommy Robinson.’ When the latter called for 50% of British Muslims to be expelled from the UK, Byline Times reported,

“Musk, the owner of X, shared the video on 22 June. Uploaded by Uncensored America under the title ‘The Islamic Invasion’, it had drawn only a few hundred reposts before his intervention. It has since passed 20 million views on X, and the post carrying it on Musk’s own account reached over 36 million.”

The major additional threat from social media is, moreover, not just its scale but that those who control its algorithms can increasingly surround each of us with a personally-tailored wall of disinformation. It does not matter how clever you are, if you are constantly consuming lies and have no ready access to unbiased information, you are likely to end up believing them.

The power of the disinformation ecosystem has never been so great.

Their rhetoric is highly effective

The 99% book illustrated some simple but powerful rhetorical tools: constant repetition of falsehoods until we have heard them so many times that it becomes almost impossible to question them, or weaponising the concept of fairness by focussing on tiny instances of difference to distract from the mind-blowingly large ones.

Repeating lies until we believe them

How many times have you heard or read that our debt is at dangerous and unprecedented levels, and for that reason a responsible government must not spend on health, pensions, education or defence? The truth is that our debt is currently at slightly below average levels as it has been for decades, and there are no grounds for hysteria.

Even more simply, how many times have you heard that if the government wants to spend more, it must either borrow or tax to fund the extra spending (either of which would by implication be undesirable)? In fact, the UK has for over half a century been operating a fiat currency system, from the Latin word meaning ‘let it be.’ This means that the government can, via the Bank of England, simply create money whenever it needs to. And it has done this to the tune of £895 billion since 2009. And every economist, politician and pundit must know that, yet we constantly hear statements stating or implying that governments cannot do this:

“There is no magic money tree” – Cameron, May and others.

“Governments borrow to cover the gap between their spending and income” – BBC

“When the Government spends more than it receives in taxes and other revenues, it needs to borrow to cover the difference.” – The House of Commons Library

These are sources that we should be able to trust on factual matters, even if we do not share their opinions. If they were to be truthful, they would at least say something like, “If it does not want to create money, the government has only two sources of revenue: taxation and borrowing.”

That would be honest but would beg the question of why the government does not want to create money now (when it did create money to bail out the banks and to fund the COVID furlough scheme). And that is a discussion many powerful people do not want to entertain.

That we cannot trust what we read or hear, from so many sources that we should be able to trust, makes us extremely vulnerable.

Weaponising ‘fairness’

There is a second extremely powerful rhetorical trick which has largely succeeded in stopping the population asking, “We are struggling – who has got all the money?”

It works like this: you find or invent a degree of inequality within the ranks of the bottom 90% and call it unfair; you then demand that in the interests of fairness there should be further levelling down within the bottom 90%. You can use those savings to enable tax breaks for the very wealthiest.

‘Intergenerational fairness’ is a common example. As the post-war welfare state has been progressively unwound, those who benefitted most are now elderly, and the deal for young people is far inferior. This has led to genuine inequality. But it is a minuscule proportion of the extreme inequality between the wealthiest and the norm. Even worse, the proposed levelling down, eg by removing the triple lock from pensions as suggested by the so-called Intergenerational Foundation will not rectify but exacerbate the problem they claim to be concerned with. The ‘substantial long-term savings’ they identify are of course reduced pensions for those who are now young. This is a policy of saving money at the cost of making today’s younger generations retire into poverty.

The same tactic is applied to seek to level down public sector pensions, and it would have similar results.

We see benefits claimants, even the disabled – not a group known for their extreme wealth – targeted for benefits reductions, supposedly on the grounds of fairness.

With immigrants – perhaps especially with immigrants – this technique has been effective. A substantial proportion of the UK population have been persuaded that our laws and policing favour people of colour over white Britons. This is the reverse of what the data show.

In all these cases, the mice of minor or invented differences are pursued with great fury while the elephants of wealth inequality are encouraged to roam in peace. This tactic is extremely powerful, and many voters have become angry and obsessed about the mice while remaining unaware of the impact on their own lives of the elephants. In this way, the non-billionaire population is divided against itself, rather than uniting against extreme inequality.

They can determine election results

It is no secret that billionaires make political donations. But the impact of billionaire involvement in elections is perhaps less well-known. Elon Musk spent over $250 million supporting the Trump 2024 election campaign. The economist Justin Wolfers analysed the impact of that $250 million as follows:

“His bet paid off: President Trump won. The states that made the difference were Pennsylvania (where Trump won by 120,266 votes), Michigan (80,103) and Wisconsin (29,397). Add it up, and the difference was roughly 230,000 votes across three swing states. And that, in turn, means that if 115,000 thousand voters had voted the other way, we would have a different president.

Next, some simple math. Let’s say that each $1,000 in campaign spending only changes one voter’s mind. (The relevant political science literature suggests that this is a very conservative estimate of the effect of money on elections, and so I’m likely understating Musk’s effect on the election.)

Thus, switching 115,000 voters would cost $115 million, which is much less than he actually spent.”

Even with more conservative assumptions, Wolfers concludes that Musk bought the 2024 election for Trump. What is happening in America is down to Musk’s support. And what makes it even more scary, is that he spent only around one four-thousandth of his wealth to achieve that objective. It is a negligible cost to him.

Musk has made no secret of his support for the far-right in British politics, and last year offered to donate $100m to one far-right party; he has since switched his support to another, even further right-wing party. And Trump’s regime has made clear that supporting the far-right in Europe, including in the UK, is now official US government policy.

With $100 million in funding, plus the support of most of our media and social media, plus meddling by hostile foreign states, there is a real risk that the far right can win our next election.

Conclusion: Do not fight the last war

We face new threats. It would be radical and uncomfortable to tackle them robustly, but if we do not, we are putting our heads into the sand, pretending that we have politics as usual – we are fighting the last war.

The Biden regime must have seen many of the same threats – Trump had, after all, incited an insurrection which almost prevented Biden’s Presidency – but they were afraid to take any radical steps to prevent Trump’s renaissance for fear that by doing so they might legitimise radical action by their opponents. With hindsight, it is clear that Trump was not concerned about what Biden or anyone else considered or did not consider legitimate. The steps set out in Project 2025 were what he and his backers wanted to do, and lack of resistance by Biden helped no one.

France in contrast has taken serious steps – which we could also take – to protect itself against hostile actors from the US and Russia. They have urged the EU to push back against Musk’s election interference, they have introduced new laws to protect against disinformation, they are seeking to reduce dependence on US (and other) Big Tech companies, by “the preferential use of digital products from providers within the EU or from trusted partner countries … [and use of] open-source solutions and modular architectures.” It plans to remove Windows from 2.6 million civil servants’ PCs and replace it with Linux.

In the UK, we have done none of this. There is a risk that we follow the US in a rapid slide towards oligarchy. We have had a government too timid to defend our democracy. We are about to see a new PM. Let us make sure he does not perpetuate the timidity.

If you think this is important, please share widely on social media, and take a look at 99% and join us.